Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Representation (German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the "truth was recognized by the sages of India"; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers (e.g., asceticism). The influence of "transcendental ideality" led him to choose atheism. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Tossup Questions # This thinker used the equality of the three sides of a triangle as an example of a situation in which there is no connection between conceptions and judgments, but merely between sides and angles. He included two diagrams of the human eye in the fourth chapter of a book arguing that coexistence is only possible through the union of time and space. He discussed the "subject in volition" as the immediate object of inner sense in a book, inspired by Aristotle's explanatory doctrines, that posits "willing," "being," "knowing," and "becoming" as necessary connections with the different classes of objects it identifies. He appended a critique of the transcendental analytic in Kantian philosophy to a later book in which he connected the Kantian ding-an-sich with the human will. For 10 points, name this thinker who built on his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, to write The World as Will and Representation. # This philosopher wrote that what he called the "first class of objects for the subject" could not be represented without the "union of Time and Space." This thinker believed that, while other forms of art are too concerned with human forms, music is the direct articulation of the basis of life and should be atop a hierarchy of the arts. This thinker critiqued the method of symmetrical analogy in his criticism of the schemata of (*) Kant, whose idea of ding-an-sich he rejected. This man, whose dissertation elaborated on principles of causality, drew upon the Upanishads in a work that proposes denying the will-to-life through asceticism to escape omnipresent suffering. For 10 points, name this man who discussed the "fourfold root" of the principle of sufficient reason, a pessimistic dude who penned The World as Will and Representation. # He's not Sigmund Freud, but in one of his works he described the issues with human intimacy through the example of a group of porcupines huddling together for warmth. That concept, known as the Hedgehog's dilemma, is found in a work named for "Appendices and Omissions" in Greek. Another work of his describes the methods of attaining the title condition via a dialectic that branches off between "ad rem"and "ad hominem." In addition to writing (*) Parerga and Paralipomena and The Art of Being Right, this man studied Indian philosophy before claiming "every action can only take place in consequence of a sufficient motive" in his most famous work. That work asserted that we should only strive to know the present and that an idea exists only in relation to an object and subject. For 10 points, name this German philosopher and author of The World as Will and Representation. # This thinker described colors as coming in three pairs of opposing ones in On Vision and Colors. "Make Your Opponent Angry" is one of the 38 stratagems for winning a debate listed by this man in his work The Art of Being Right. This man described the four classes of sufficient reason in his doctoral dissertation. This philosopher, who critiqued the work of Kant using the concept of "thing-in-itself," was highly influenced by the Upanishads. For 10 points, name this German author who wrote The World as Will and Representation. # This thinker claimed that Euclid's parallel postulate was self-evident but criticized another of Euclid's axioms for being grounded in empirical reasoning. In another book, this thinker thought up a "dream organ" that distorts sense-data and accounts for supernatural phenomena and hatefully railed against the adulation of a certain subclass with inferior reasoning skills and limited capacity for physical and mental work. This thinker wrote an "Essay on Ghost Seeing," classified objects as becoming, knowing, willing, and being in his doctoral dissertation, and revealed his misogyny in "On Women." In his most famous work, he drew on the Upanishads and criticized Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself as independent of our observations. For 10 points, name this pessimistic philosopher, the author of Parerga and Parolipomena, The Fourfold Root, and The World as Will and Idea.